Blogmatics: What God Can And Cannot Do

This is the fourth part of a new series I’m calling Blogmatics. It’s an attempt on my part to lay out as best I can in as brief a manner as I can all the theological assumptions behind my blog posts.

Can God make a rock so heavy He can’t move it?

Can God make a 4-sided triangle?

Does God know the future?

All of these questions speak to our fascination with the extent of God’s power, specifically whether or not God can do the impossible.

For many of us, though we speak of love and grace and forgiveness, it is the ability to do the impossible that, in our minds, truly makes God, God. So, when we are faced with a situation in which God seems incapable of doing something we panic, worried that that inability somehow dimishes God’s divinity.

I am not convinced it does.

In fact, I think the limits of God’s power, most of which I believe God has placed upon Himself, speak to a God deeply interested in an authentic, loving relationship that can’t be had without an act of kenosis. And that relationship, I think, is much more interesting, appealing, and powerful than the ability to do magic tricks.

In one of my favorite books of all time, The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis paints a beautiful picture of the limits of God’s power. In a scene towards the end of the book, Eustace, Jill, Tirian, and the Pevensie children are standing alongside Aslan in the new Narnia looking on at a group of dwarfs who believe they are stuck inside a dark barn. Frustrated that the dwarfs can’t see their true beautiful surroundings, Lucy begs Aslan to do something to make the dwarfs see the reality of their situation.

Aslan replies to Lucy saying, “Dearest, I will show you what I can and what I cannot do.”

Acquiescing to Lucy’s request, Aslan approaches the dwarves, shakes his mane, and instantly a magnificent feast appears in the dwarfs’ laps.

But they can’t see it for what it really is.

They think someone is simply hiding in the barn with them making lion sounds in order to scare them. They do know there’s food in their laps, but they give no thought to where it came from, instead greedily fighting over it believing they’ve been given hay and turnips.

In what I think is an act of beautiful theology, Aslan attempts to clarify the children’s confusion, “You see, they will not let us help them…their prison is only in their mind and yet they are in that prison and so afraid of being taking in out.”

In other words, no matter how hard Aslan tried, no matter the great miracles he performed, or even how much he desired in his heart that the dwarfs be set free, he could not give them that freedom because they refused his help.

The point I think C.S. Lewis is trying to make here is that there are some things God simply can’t do and that’s ok. Aslan’s inability to force the dwarfs to recognize their surroundings doesn’t take anything away from his divinity (if I can use that word, though Lewis does not) because what was being asked of him was itself intrinsically impossible.

The same is true for God.

For example, God can’t make a triangle have 4 sides. God can’t make the color red simultaneously be the color black. And if free will exists, then not only can God not force us to do things that are against our will, but because our actions are dependent on free decisions, God cannot know the future. God can know what God plans on doing in the future, declare those plans to humanity, and carry them out because God is God. But if we have free will, then the future hasn’t been written and therefore God can’t know it because it’s not something to be known.

Which is why God’s inability to do the intrinsically impossible is ok.

God’s inability to make a 4 sided triangle, to make the color red also be the color black, or even to know the future isn’t a deficiency on the part of God because those are things that cannot happen anyway, therefore God isn’t lacking in those powers because those powers themselves do not exist because they cannot exist.

To be clear, while I affirm the law of non-contradiction, I do believe in miracles. If God exists, and I believe God does, then God has the ability to work within the laws God created to do what seems to us to be the impossible – separate the sea, turn water into wine, walk on water, heal the sick, raise from the dead. I fully recognize the scientific problems inherent in these acts of God, but as they are not inherently contradictory things like 4-sided triangles or knowledge of a future that doesn’t exist, I feel comfortable affirming them in faith that like walking on the moon would be to a caveman, God’s intimate knowledge of the universe He created allows God to do things that seem impossible to us.

But I do believe that not only logic, but the Bible itself speaks to the limitation of God’s power, for even Jesus himself could not perform miracles in his own hometown when the people rejected him – a moment Lewis surely found inspiration in for the aforementioned scene in The Last Battle

There is nothing virtuous about denying the simple and Biblical truth that whether by choice or intrinsic impossibility there are some things God simply cannot do.

If we bury our heads in the sand at this point and refuse to acknowledge this reality (a reality God Himself created), then we miss the real beauty of what Jesus meant when he said, “With God all things are possible.”

In uttering these famous words Jesus was not affirming the Superman-Harry Potter version of God so many of us want to believe to, that so many of us need to believe in in order to support our theological paradigms and satisfy our need to have control over the world through a God we can manipulate through prayer to do whatever we wish.

When Jesus talked about God making the impossible possible he was speaking right after his encounter with the rich young ruler who went away sad after Jesus told him to sell everything he had. After the ruler left, Jesus made a joke about camels and the eyes of needles. Albeit a not so funny one in 21st century terms, but a joke nonetheless about how difficult it would be for the rich to get to heaven, even though everyone assumed they were blessed by God and therefore were automatically going to heaven. The disciples sarcastically asked “Who then can be saved?”

To which Jesus replied “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

Jesus wasn’t talking about 4 sided triangles or multicolor colors. Jesus was talking about taking impossibly hopeless, corrupt, wicked, and selfish people and transforming them into saints and the world around them into the kingdom of God. Not by force, but through the sort of sacrificial love Jesus would demonstrate on the cross only a few chapters later.

This is the sort of impossible things God can do, that God wants to do.

God is not a magician or a genie or a superhero, and as long as we think of God in that way we miss out on the truly incredible things God is trying to do in and through us (not to mention we create highly problematic theological systems in which God has unbounded power but inexplicably chooses not to act).

In the end, I think our fear that there may be things God cannot do and our stubborn rejection of that truth in the face of reality, says much more about us then it does about God.

It says that Jesus isn’t good enough for us, that a God who would reject the temptation to exert absolute power isn’t acceptable to our human sensibilities that tell us might makes right, that one can only reign through force.

Like it was for so many in Jesus’ day, we expect, we want a conquering king who can do the impossible. When Jesus showed up in manger he was ignored by all but a handful of people. When he was hung on a cross he was rejected as a failure.

I only hope that we don’t become so lost in our theological systems and consumed by our lust for power that we once again miss out on the unexpected God who has come to save us.

I like this post and where you are coming from and I agree with almost everything. One thing that still trips me up about whether or not God can know the future is the idea that God is eternal and exists outside of time as we know it and experience it. C. S. Lewis seemed to believe this when he wrote about the present moment being the one in which time touches eternity, and therefore the only way in which we can interact with God right now, because for God, every moment is present. It would seem then that God created time as we experience it and placed us within it. Or would you say that God limited Himself in this way as well, placing Himself in the same timeline with us… at least for now?

ZackHunt

I would say that God is very much in time otherwise I don’t how to talk about the incarnation, nor would I be able to make sense of any of the biblical accounts where God interacts with creation. Those sort of action (as well as the Spirit’s continued presence in our lives) require that God be in time, though that doesn’t mean God is bound by time.

That being said, even if God was outside of time I would still reject the idea that God knows the future. The idea that God sees all of time at once assumes that the future is at least from the persective of God something that has already happened or is happening. If free will exists, I don’t think that would be possible. If God did have a persective outside of time and if free will exists, then all God would see or know would be the past and an always unfolding present. However, there are still problems with that. If God is outside of time God would have know way of knowing what was happening “now” in our time which raises all sorts of problems for God being able to ineract with us and do things like respond to our prayers. Moreover, if God was outside time and therefore had no frame of reference for past, present, and future then we would posses an ability or power that God did not, which to me seems highly problematic if not altogether nonsensical.

I know that idea of God being outside time is highly appealing for maintaining a classical theism position which claims God knows the future, but ultimately I just don’t see how it’s possible to talk about God being outside time in the context of a Christian faith which is grounded in the complete opposite assumption – that God became man and dwelt among us.

I do believe that God is timeless, but once God created and interacted in time (as the Bible affirms) God was necessarily in time.

Hope that helps clear up my position. Thanks for asking.

Karen

So for you, Zack, God’s entering into time/space, means that He is no longer simultaneously also beyond it? If God in his essential nature is not one exalted being among many other beings, but rather Being itself as Christians have classically taught and understood, and if consequently the Scripture can say “in Him we live and move and have our being,” doesn’t this suggest God can be, from our perspective, two “places” at once (especially if He is, by definition, Himself infinite, eternal and identical with one of those “places”)? I’m sorry, Zack, but your reasoning here sounds just way too anthropomorphic to me. I suspect there is a reason that “Open Theism” of this sort has never before found a place among Christians professing themselves “orthodox.” Perhaps it is contrary to the apostles’ experience of Christ and understanding of His teaching. Alas, so it seems to me are many of the Protestant notions of God’s “sovereignty” wherein our “free will” is collapsed into the Divine will and we can’t view his “foreknowledge” as anything less than also divine determinism of the individual’s free will. One distortion begets another.

I do think God’s knowledge of “the future” (which is nothing more than a theoretical abstraction as far as theories of God’s way of knowing things are concerned anyway) may be more along the lines of Shawn’s philosophy professor’s question. God perfectly knows what is and He perfectly knows Himself and His own intents. When he makes a prediction through his prophets, there is usually a contingency involved and what the outcome will be really depends upon human choice. Nevertheless, there are many times God appears to know exactly what that choice will be as well.

ZackHunt

I’m not sure how affirming God’s existence inside of time is contrary to Christian tradition, apostolic teaching, or orthodoxy. In fact, I would argue quite the opposite. The Bible is, if nothing else, a testimony to God’s interaction with and being affected by time. Talking about God being inside of time isn’t anthropomorphic. It’s a logical conclusion based on God’s interaction with humanity. Though, I would still be comfortable with some level of anthropomorphism since Christianity is a faith fundamentally grounded in belief in a God who became man.

God’s relationship to time is like God’s relationship to power. Whatever it may have been before God created it changed. And since the moment of creation God has chosen to place himself in time. That doesn’t mean God is bound by time in the sense that we are, but there is no language we use in the Christian faith about God’s relationship to time that doesn’t itself employ time contingent language – eternity, infinity, timeless – all those terms relate to time.

If we’re are going to claim that God (or anything else) is “outside of time” then we have the obligation to describe in at least some vague sense what that would look like using language that is not related to time. Otherwise, that concept makes no sense. At least not to me and many others.

But even if we do affirm that is a tenable concept, God can’t be simultaneously in time and not in time. That’s not a paradox, it’s just a contradiction.

You’re certainly free to disagree, but this is not a matter of orthodoxy. It’s just a philosophical disagreement.

Karen

I think perhaps we are talking past each other a bit, for which I will accept full responsibility. I have been imbibing Orthodox language of “apophaticism” about God for some years (and this informs all my thinking about statements about what God “is” or what God “does” that necessarily must use human analogy). But I have not been doing so nearly long or carefully enough to be able to easily explain what this means to others.

It might be helpful also to understand that in Orthodox theology, one very foundational philosophical distinction is “created” (the angelic orders, us, all of the material universe), vs. “uncreated” (God, the Self-existent Creator, eternally existing in three Persons, the Trinity). The created is contingent; the uncreated is not. The uncreated can only be described in human language and in terms of creation by the use of the most imperfect analogies, so any statements about what God is or does need to be qualified by statements about what he is not, or there will be serious distortion in our understanding.

Going on from there, in asserting that God is “outside” of time, I wasn’t positing this as an opposite to His being also “inside” of time though this might seem to be required by merely human logic. Rather I was using this in the sense of his being “unbounded” by time/space in the way that we are (which you seem also to affirm on some level in your comment to me) even though he operates by the Holy Spirit for the moment in our experience within the limitations of time and space (as in the Incarnation) as well. I would go further than you perhaps to also add that in Orthodox “apophatic” terms, to say God is “eternal” and “infinite” does not mean he goes on and on forever in terms of time and space in some quantitative sense, but rather he is not properly, in and of himself, defined nor bounded by those categories at all, which pertain rather to the creation and our finite, limited created experience. The space/time human language of “eternity” and “infinitude” have to be qualified by this kind of apophatic language of what God is “not” if a fully Orthodox definition (and experience) of God is to be preserved.

This is a key difference (from what I understand from those more educated about this than I) between Eastern and Western Christian ways of speaking about God and doing “theology.” God’s “otherness’ in this sense from an Orthodox perspective can be genuinely encountered in human experience, but it can never be fully comprehended or fully explained in terms of human reason, logic and language, which are necessarily bounded by the limitations of our created existence and experience.

This may be one reason why Eastern Christians informed about the teachings of their faith do not hold that belief in God’s “foreknowledge” commits one to divine determinism, nor do the Orthodox understand the Apostle Paul’s teaching of God’s “predestination” of the elect to share in the divine glory of God’s Son to mean anything more than God will fulfill his purpose for humankind in all those who freely choose to follow him by conforming them fully to the image of his Son. It certainly does not mean he manipulates or determines human free will, much less imply that he actively wills the damnation of those who abuse their freedom to reject him. However, our modern ideas of what constitutes “freedom” also come into play and work mischief with these biblical doctrines as well it seems to me, but I regret that a discussion of that is also well above my pay grade!

Shawn Smucker

I’ve always found the idea of God not knowing the future an appealing one. My philosophy professor posed an interesting question having to do with this: Perhaps God doesn’t know the future, but if God knows every single thing that is going on right now, in the present, including our thoughts, the movement of every cell in our bodies, the past we’ve experienced, the pain we’ve experienced, our greatest desires…everything…what would his ability be in predicting the future? And what is the difference between knowing the future and knowing so much about the present that you can predict with accuracy what will happen?

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on that.

Thanks for the post.

http://neyhart.blogspot.com/ Jennifer

This reminds me of what Greg Boyd says about God being able to know every possibility perfectly so that it is as if He knows the future, but it is still different than saying that He does know the future. At least I think that is at least part of his definition of “Open Theism” in a nutshell. Thoughts on that?

ZackHunt

I would definitely go along with God being able to predict at least our immediate actions given God’s infinite knowledge, but I still think there’s a tremendous difference between prediction and predestination. Prediction allows for freedom and even the chance for God to be about what God thought we would do (which the Bible records happening multiple times). But predestination allows for no freedom and raises tremendous problems regarding our guilt for sin and particularly the problem of evil. So all that to say, though similar I think there are some really, really important differences between the two, not least of all what God giving us the ability to freely decide says about the nature of God.

http://twitter.com/mr_davison Gaz

Hi Zack, your favourite heretic here again! I’m interested in your idea of God not knowing the future, and how you’d work that hypothesis alongside the immense prophecies that he gave through his prophets which have come true. Was Jesus a plan B to save the creation from abject failure or was he plan A right from the beginning, God knowing that mankind would fail to live a sinless life?

ZackHunt

Hey Gaz,

Welcome back. I actually addressed that in the post. But by way of clarification I think it’s important to note that Biblical prophecy is not the same thing as Nostradamus’ prophecies. They Biblical prophets weren’t trying to predict the future. They were calling the people to repentance and God warned them about what he would do if they didn’t repent. As I said, because God is God He can make plans, declare those plans, and then carry them out in whatever situation presents itself. But that does not require a knowledge of the future. As for the Jesus question, you can find answers all over the map for that one throughout the history of the church, but if it was “plan B” I personally would have no problem with that as to me it would speak to a God in authentic and dynamic relationship with creation that isn’t preprogrammed like computer software.

Karen

Zack and Gaz, if you have an interest, I believe some of the early Greek fathers, and more fully developed by the Eastern Church father, St. Maximus the Confessor, addressed this issue. Their perspective is that of the EO Church today. If memory serves, it may have been the very early bishop, St. Irenaeus (2nd century), who first taught that the Incarnation would have had to occur and was a part of God’s plan for creation even if mankind had never sinned. IOW, their answer is definitely Plan A and then some. I recommend you explore this issue as you seek to more deeply understand all the implications of God as Creator, the Incarnation, and the nature of God’s involvement with us, his creatures, in this temporal age.

Why do we necessarily have to define “time” as “past, present and future”? The past is only memory and the future doesn’t exist until its here and at that point it is the present, filled with the memories of the past. So, what if time only exists in the here and the now forcing us to redefine “time” as simply “present”. Just a thought.

Karen

Hi Steve,
Your thought reminded me that there are two Greek terms used in the Bible for time. One is “chronos,” from which we get our English term “chronological” and pertains to what we normally understand as “time” in the temporal world of the senses. The other is “Kairos” and refers to the realm of the Eternal–“time” beyond “chronos,” if you will. I can’t remember all the specifics, so I will have to look it up, but you could probably do the same just as easily if you are interested. It might yield some more insight.

Also, your comment reflects a very Orthodox perspective about the nature of things real/spiritual. True prayer, for the very reason you have stated, can only occur by keeping one’s attention focussed in the present moment because only here can we encounter God as He is in Himself (rather than in our imaginings of Him, which is not the same thing). This is the purpose of the practice of what is commonly known as “the prayer” in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and as the “Jesus prayer” in the Western Christian tradition.

Erin Pascal

Great insights to ponder upon. I especially loved this analogy, “No matter how hard Aslan tried, no matter the great miracles he performed, or even how much he desired in his heart that the dwarfs be set free, he could not give them that freedom because they refused his help.”

Ben Nasmith

Hi Zack,
I’ve also concluded that the incarnation is evidence that God is ‘inside time’. What I don’t understand about open theism is why human freedom entails that God doesn’t know the future? As I see it, there’s no contradiction between God’s foreknowledge and human freedom since (contrary to many classical and open theists) foreknowledge does not equal foreordination. How do you get from human freedom to not knowing the future?

I can’t speak for everyone in the open theism camp, but for me, as I said in the post, I don’t think God knows the future because there’s not a future to be known. If free will exists then the future must necessarily not be written yet otherwise it would have been predetermined. If God did stand outside time and saw everything in time at once and the future was part of that, then it would be something that already exists. So if God did somehow stand outside time I think God would see the entirety of the past and an always unfolding present, but there would be no future to see.

I think our mistake is thinking of the future in terms of Back to the Future, that we could somehow jump in a time machine and visit the future but God doesn’t need the Delorean because he can see it already.

I just don’t think there’s anything to be seen or visit because the future doesn’t exist. It will exist eventually but then it will no longer be the future.

Again, this isn’t a deficiency on God’s part because its not something that could be known anyway – like the story of the South winning the Civil War. That never happened so its not knowledge God has, but that doesn’t make it a deficiency of God’s part.

Ben Nasmith

I also agree that the future doesn’t exist. But I don’t see how it follows that God doesn’t know what will happen. Does God need to ‘see’ something to know it’s true?
An example. God knows things that ‘would have happened’ if the world had turned out differently. Even humans know what would have happened to some extent. Such knowledge is independent of ‘being outside of reality’ so as to ‘see’ other possible worlds. In the same way, it seems to me that God can know what will happen even if the human choices that determine the future have not occurred. Just as I have imperfect knowledge of how my friends will choose without being the cause of their choice, God has perfect knowledge of what people choose without being the cause of their choice.
Thanks for you reply,

Karen

Ben, I agree that God doesn’t know “the future” in the sense Zack is talking about because it doesn’t exist. I do believe God is both in and outside of time, though, and that all things that have ever occurred or are going to occur (from our perspective within time)–every decision that will be made–are present to Him as occurring or having occurred, and he knows these things by direct perception of them because they are real and exist (or from our perspective, have existed).

On the other hand, it seems to me what “would have been” is in the realm of human fantasy. The game of probability is a human science with some value to human beings, but one for which God should have no need to indulge because of the way in which He, being outside time, already knows things. There is absolutely no need that I can see for us to argue God knows something in this way, since this is not true “knowledge” in a spiritual sense, which as I understand it, refers rather to God’s perfect power of perception of what actually is–of Himself and of all that He has created). Does this make sense? I agree that God has perfect knowledge of people’s choices without this meaning he has foreordained those choices in the sense of directly willing them such that those who make those choices are not genuinely exercising freedom of their wills.

Ben Nasmith

Hi Karen,
Not sure if I fully understand your view presented here but I have a few questions/thoughts.
First, I don’t know what it even means to say that God is both inside and outside of time. Maybe you can explain. Are you aware of the tensed vs. tenseless theories of time? Sounds like you believe God is outside of time after all (except your first sentence).
Second, why think that God has to ‘see’ something to know it? I’d rather just say that God knows everything there is to be known by definition. Even humans know more than they can ‘see’ (math, theories, religion at times).
Third, do you really think that God doesn’t know the truth about counterfactual possibilities? Even I know some counterfactual truth, like whether my wife would say yes to ice cream if I offered her some. Of course God can’t see other possibilities (there’s nothing to see), but he can still know what ‘would have happened’ accurately. There are passages in the bible where God talks about what would have happened, or what will happen if…, so it would be hard to explain those without him knowing about possibilities in addition to actualities.
It’s complicated, but I like talking about this stuff. Thanks

Karen

Thanks, Ben. I see what you are saying about your wife and the contingent scenarios in the Scriptures. I understand these as based on God’s intimate personal knowledge of his creatures that is connected to the kind of perception I understand God to have which is based on something real–i.e., a person’s motivations, needs, tastes, habits, etc.. That kind of personal knowledge is certainly something I see as applying to God, only on a much more perfect and profound level than for us.

As to God being “inside and outside” of time, I’m not a trained scientist or philosopher, so I may be using terms imprecisely, but my understanding is based on the teaching of Scripture that God is uncreated, eternal, and infinitely beyond us (transcendent) and that we in our finite existence as creatures have our being somehow “in God” (Acts 17:26-28), so he is immanent for us, too. God cannot be limited to only being within his creation (though His presence permeates the world according to traditional Christian understanding–Psalm 139, esp. vss. 7-12 comes to mind), but his creation can be fully contained within him. So if you want a symbolic picture that corresponds to how I understand this, it might be a sphere representing the created world, time space, etc., the very center of which represents the beginning of its creation and the circumference of which represents the end of time/space (the bounds God has set for this temporal existence we now inhabit). God is in the space inside the circle and also the space outside of it extending infinitely in all directions. As his presence, so also his knowledge.

As to God not needing to “see” something to know it, my point was really that he doesn’t need to reason out probabilities because he has actual perception of everything that has been, is, or from our perspective at a given point in time, will be. IOW, he perceives all that remains hidden to us. He may not need to perceive something to know it, but he does perceive it and so none of God’s “knowledge” is just conjecture or subject to error as is often the case with us. I’m not saying that God could not very well reason something out and accurately predict an outcome if he chose or needed to do so, but I am saying he doesn’t need to. The “darkness is as light to him” as the Psalmist says.

I wonder what Zack would do with Psalm 139:16? How is this not the Psalmist’s affirmation that God knows what is at least at some point “the future” for us (even if it is not “the future” in the “Back to the Future” sense for God)? The first and not the latter sense is what I mean to affirm as orthodox Christian understanding about God’s perfect knowledge of “the future.”

Hey Zach, great post. I really like what you said about Jesus not being a super-hero and how that relates to our desire to be in control.
I also have issue with the idea that God doesn’t know the future though. You say God can’t know the future because it is not something to be known. First can you give more explanation to why that can’t be known? It doesn’t seem to be an intrinsic impossibility, like a 4 sided triangle. You seem to think that if he knows what will happen then we lack free will but I don’t see those as a contradiction. As many others have created examples to explain it, his knowledge of my decisions doesn’t mean I am not making them. You mention in a comment that we think of the future like Back to the Future, as if we or God could visit it. That is a very important distinction. I think there is a very big difference between God knowing exactly how things will play out and there being some type of physical reality of the future.
Additionally the bible offers many examples of the future being known. Psalms 139:16, “…all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” Revelation 13:8, “…everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life.” I think a strong case could be made for a biblical president of God’s foreknowledge of everything.

The Irish Atheist

Isn’t your assertion that God doesn’t know the future because of our own free will contradicted by the account of Jesus knowing that Judas was going to betray him?

Karen

Here’s a more authoritative summary of the EO perspective on the nature of God’s knowledge of “the future”: